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The FCC voted to reimplement net neutrality. Now comes the hard part
- mlindner 3y agoAnd there's been no changes since it was supposedly gotten rid of (in reality, we never had it in the first place). My internet speed has gotten much faster in fact.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- W3cUYxYwmXb5c 3y ago[flagged]
- Spivak 3y agoOr ya know, you could just look at the violations that already happened. Like were you not around for the bullshit Verizon tethering plan? It was one of the reasons I rooted my phone. https://www.freepress.net/blog/net-neutrality-violations-brief-history https://www.freepress.net/blog/net-neutrality-violations-bri...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- graphe 3y agoWhat about after it was repealed?
- behringer 3y agoYou mean like increased Netflix prices due to being charged both for my Comcast service and my Comcast usage via Netflix? I'm still waiting for my better internet service too... That never seemed to materialize after getting rid of net neutrality.
- edmundsauto 3y agoWasn’t the increased Netflix price because they realized they weren’t charging the maximum the market would bear?
- behringer 3y agodefinitely not. It's due to net neutrality being thrown out under Trump and Ajit Pai. Even under the fair market, you would hardly call it fair, taking money from your customers to give them access to service providers, and taking money from your customer's service providers to allow them access to your customer... it doesn't make sense. It was a shakedown plain and simple.
- scrps 3y agoNot sure at netflix scale if NN really affected them iirc netflix does most everything on the edge, I doubt most of your netflix traffic even left comcast's network other than maybe auth data. Not saying you are wrong about cost increases in general, I think it probably had more of an impact on more up and coming services who might not have the funds to ship out a ton of edge servers.
- danShumway 3y agoSee https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20687903/net-neutrality-was-repealed-a-year-ago-whats-happened-since https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20687903/net-neutrality-wa..., a mere year after the repeal. But I think it's really silly to to look at an industry with documented abuse in the absence of regulation and to essentially ignore that and say "but what about the abuses within this specific time period?" We know that under current broadband rules absent Net Neutrality, the abuses described above are legal. We've seen companies engage in those abuses. To the extent that the worst of that behavior is still illegal, it's only because individual states like California have picked up the fight, which broadband providers have fought fiercely to prevent. But there's no evidence that broadband providers wouldn't repeat the same behaviors given the opportunity. Broadband providers do engage in behavior today that would be in violation of Net Neutrality rules, particularly around video throttling and zero-rating. The ongoing fight over Net Neutrality and increased customer attention might be limiting that behavior, but if anything that's evidence that increased scrutiny is good for the market, not that it's unnecessary. Companies have in the absence of Net Neutrality, taken advantage of the lack of regulations about as much as was feasible for them to do so. There's a weird pattern on HN I'm noticing where people are holding a wild dog at bay with a stick, and other people are standing behind them saying, "I thought you said if we unleashed this dog it was going to maul us, you sure have egg on your face. See, there's no reason to leash the dog."
- graphe 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_Protection_and_Net_Neutrality_Act_of_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_P... Net neutrality was in place and didn't help actually.
- danShumway 3y agoOkay, walk me through this :) Your argument is that Net Neutrality isn't necessary, because consumers weren't abused to the degree that people were warned about once Net Neutrality was no longer in effect. Of course, companies have abused the market in Net Neutrality's absence, but you're only looking at abuses after 2018. And when confronted with abuses that happened after 2018, your response is to say that Net Neutrality post-2018... was still in effect. I'm not sure how you're expecting people to react to that kind of logic? But I don't think that asking "why weren't people abused in the absence of the law that was still being enforced?" comes across as quite as strong of an argument as you might be imagining. ---- I don't mean to be too snarky here, so to clarify and expand on the above: the existence of California's Net Neutrality laws are what people have been referring to when we talk about state-level regulations that kept the post-2018 landscape from getting as bad as it could have gotten. This is not a surprise, I literally brought up California's Net Neutrality rules in my comment above, and it's just kind of wild to me that you were apparently aware of them but didn't think to ask yourself whether or not they might have impacted the post-2018 commercial landscape. To go back to the dog analogy, people are fending off the wild dog with a stick, and you're over on the side saying, "see, the dog hasn't attacked anybody, we don't need to leash it", and then the dog bites a volunteer firefighter and your response is, "well, clearly the stick didn't help, so that's even more evidence that leashing the dog is a waste of time." :) You should of course be aware (having read through the link that you shared) that California was sued by both the industry and by the DOJ itself to try and repeal that law, so it seems fairly clear both that the industry viewed state-level NN as a constraint on its behavior and that the industry and administration of the time wanted those regulations to go away. It's reasonable to conclude that state-level interventions like California's helped curb industry abuse. Nevertheless, as the article I posted above points out: > When the Trump FCC repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order, it didn’t just eliminate the prohibitions against blocking and throttling and paid prioritization. [..] it also gave away oversight over the broadband industry. The FCC abdicated its responsibility to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market. That is the most important thing that happened on December 14th, 2017 when the FCC repealed the Open Internet Order. > [...] and the fire department had no place to go. They can’t go to the FCC because the FCC abdicated their authority over broadband. They wouldn’t go to the FTC because they take forever to adjudicate complaints. So if Verizon throttles your broadband, there’s nothing they can do about it. The repeal of Net Neutrality on the grounds that the FCC did not have the authority to regulate in this area effectively got rid of a broad class of federal regulation and recourse against abusive behavior; there was a rippling effect beyond just zero-rating or content-targeted throttling/blocking. So while California's Net Neutrality enforcement was a good thing for the country overall and did help to curb abuses for the country overall, it is still not a full substitute for the federal government doing its job regulating bad behavior and protecting consumers.
- booleandilemma 3y agoIf net neutrality isn't the thing protecting Americans from some kind of internet dystopia where data for each service is treated and billed differently, then what is? There must be some law preventing it, because knowing companies, they'll do the basest things they can get away with, and I'm sure they'd love to do this. This is what I mean, from Indonesia: https://www.traveltomtom.net/media/cached-resp-images/images/nieuwe_indeling/artikels/indonesia/best_indonesia_tourist_sim_card/telkomsel_indonesia_prepaid_sim_card_plans_2023_1200.webp?version=1a012a97344c0269cdde3c062b3752d4 https://www.traveltomtom.net/media/cached-resp-images/images...
- wmf 3y agoISPs want to make as much money as possible but there are multiple ways to do that. Once ISPs discovered that "fast lanes" and similar ideas are bad PR they moved on to peering extortion. Unfortunately, activists haven't really adapted and are still mostly talking about QoS and protocol blocking.
- Buttons840 3y agoAds are bad PR, raising prices are bad PR, yet we see plenty of both.
- Spooky23 3y agoThey make money selling all sorts of stuff. Wireless was never neutral, but tech and the marginal competitive pressures kept it ok. My Spectrum connection is 40% more expensive and 0% faster than it was in 2013. My Wireless spend is 20% lower and 2-5x faster. Between the industry astroturfing and the splinterd advocacy, "net neutrality" is almost as meaningless as "fake news".
- falcrist 3y ago> Between the industry astroturfing and the splinterd advocacy, "net neutrality" is almost as meaningless as "fake news". I have to disagree with this. There's a very clear meaning, and the 2015 FCC rules for wired connections put it succinctly. No blocking or throttling of legal content, and no paid prioritization. The wikipedia article has more information, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
- scrps 3y agoI don't remember that at all but I do remember a time when using politicians to deregulate industry so said industry can rent-seek was called corporate welfare.
- hansjorg 3y agoWhen it was removed, several states, stepped up and introduced their own net neutrality laws. E.g California with their Internet Consumer Protection and Net Neutrality Act. Some of the large telecoms are on record saying that this made it not worth it to enact the changes they had planned. WNYC On The Media had an episode on this recently.
- Alupis 3y agoOr how you could ask 10 people what Net Neutrality meant and get 12 different answers, none of which related to the proposed policies?
- pessimizer 3y agoThe fact that people were warned of a probable outcome of failing at net neutrality, making that outcome unbelievably unpopular, is the reason we didn't have that outcome. What you refer to as being "manipulated" is more neutrally called campaigning and arguing one's case. I know the zeitgeist is to make it seem like ideas we don't support are a form of terrorism. "Manipulated" is hiring temps to submit public comments to the FCC.
- digging 3y agoAwful take. Reads like Ajit Pai wrote it. People were warning that without NN the internet as we knew it could be destroyed. The fact that it wasn't immediately destroyed doesn't make them wrong. It just means we didn't get the worst possible outcome.
- nicexe 3y agoIs the title the actual article? The only extra info in the page is a semi-unrelated pic.
- LoganDark 3y agoLooks like it's only available to members with an account, but accounts can only be obtained via "contact us" (and probably a very expensive subscription). Here's an "unlocked" link (good until Nov 19th): https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/723252/the-fcc-voted-to-reimplement-net-neutrality-now-comes-the-hard-part/?unlock=569B52WRNGIDXUUH https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/723252/the-fcc-voted-to-re... Snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20231110203104/https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/723252/the-fcc-voted-to-reimplement-net-neutrality-now-comes-the-hard-part/?unlock=569B52WRNGIDXUUH https://web.archive.org/web/20231110203104/https://www.natio... (I used the Wayback Machine because both archive.is and archive.ph are endless captcha loops.)
- leotravis10 3y agoSadly, I can't get past the "continue" button prompt.
- LoganDark 3y agoThere should be no need, you can just use uBlock to remove the entire prompt, since it doesn't scroll-lock the page.
- thedaly 3y agoHere is a backup of the unlocked link: https://archive.is/hBf2Z https://archive.is/hBf2Z
- LoganDark 3y agoThat's an endless cloudflare captcha loop, but ty
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- leotravis10 3y agoI feel that SCOTUS will have to put this Net Neutrality debate to a end one way or another. Even if it's voted upon, expect lawsuits and legal battles that eventually, the highest court will have to get involved and we'll know if it's allowed to stand, or closing the books on consumer protections for a generation.
- willis936 3y agoThat's not the SCOTUS' job. The legislative branch sets these rules. The judiciary just interprets them and makes sure the rule set is self consistent (new rules don't break existing rules). The SCOTUS has no business in drawing these lines.
- jtbayly 3y agoWhich branch of government is the FCC?
- jasonjayr 3y agoExecutive, with rule-making authority. (Rules that can be changed by the legislative branch)
- jtbayly 3y agoPrecisely. Which is why it will end up being decided by the courts. Because the legislative branch hasn't passed a law. The unelected, unaccountable committee that changes at the whim of the president is not the place to legislate. If you want to pass a law, pass a law.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoUnelected in a way, but their boss is elected, and they are absolutely accountable. There is no “whim” upon which these rules change, there was however an election that replaced their boss with someone else. You either care about accountability and therefore laud their changing position based on that accountability, or you’re just parroting a blind argument conservatives have been making for a number of years now because you don’t like their most recent decision.
- dbsmith83 3y agoRemember during the public commentary about removing it, there were millions of automated messages claiming to be pro-removal? What ever happened with that? Did anyone ever get in trouble?
- az226 3y agoThe data was “accidentally” deleted.
- mikeyouse 3y agoAjit Pai deemed the issue unimportant so they took no action Federally and then voted to kill NN. Eric Schneiderman, New York's AG, began an investigation since a bunch of the fake comments used real people's information, so they had an 'identity theft' nexus to state laws -- but Pai refused to aid the investigation in any way: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16686644/eric-schneiderman-fcc-net-neutrality-spam-investigation-evidence https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16686644/eric-schneiderm... That's the problem with electing people who don't believe in democracy or civil service, they have so many levers to use to dismantle things including just straight obstruction. Echos of the FEC's corruption, where several members tasked with upholding election law have decided they're just not going to do that, contrary to the professional staff who've indicated that laws were likely broken: https://www.fec.gov/files/legal/murs/7968/7968_14.pdf https://www.fec.gov/files/legal/murs/7968/7968_14.pdf
- dbsmith83 3y agoSo disheartening. It's insane that in the US that public officials aren't held accountable for basically defrauding the public, like a banana republic. Worst of all, most people don't even care. I don't even recall orgs like Fight for the Future even trying to hold anyone accountable for this.
- skymast 3y ago[dead]
- skizm 3y agohttps://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2023/05/11/720346.htm https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2023/05/11/720346...
- thedaly 3y agohttps://archive.is/hBf2Z https://archive.is/hBf2Z